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Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,15-51159,00.html
THURSDAY DECEMBER 14 2000
US Election 2000
Civil rights leader calls for protest
BY DAMIAN WHITWORTH
JESSE JACKSON, the civil rights leader, called for massive non-
violent demonstrations yesterday against the US Supreme Court ruling
that handed George W. Bush the presidency.
The black leader, who spoke to Al Gore daily during the battle over
Florida, had said that if the court ruled against the Vice-President
it would "create a civil rights explosion".
"People will not surrender to this tyranny. We will fight back," he
said. Often the loudest and most incendiary voice in the dispute, Mr
Jackson provided the most vivid evidence yesterday of polarisation in
the country.
"In Third World countries when democratically cast votes are not
counted or the person who most likely lost wins in a highly
questionable manner, we usually refer to that as a coup d'etat," he
said.
"I see this decision as a potential threat to our democracy and
potentially destabilising to our democratic institutions. I see it as
undermining the legitimacy of a President Bush."
Mr Jackson, who had led calls for an investigation into allegations
that thousands of blacks were impeded from voting Democrat in
Florida, had argued that Mr Gore should not concede until the last
legal option was exhausted. He accused Mr Bush of stealing the
election and cautioned that he would mobilise protests against him.
"We will take to the streets, we will delegitimise Bush, discredit
him, do whatever it takes, but never accept him," he said, adding
that the holiday in honour of Martin Luther King, five days before
the inauguration on January 20, should be marked by street
demonstrations.
"We will not surrender our franchise," he said. Mr Jackson has also
pledged that his Rainbow/Push coalition would challenge the election
by obtaining the disputed ballots through Florida's open records law
and count the votes themselves. "We will know before January 20 that
Gore got most of the votes," he said.
Resentment looked certain to linger longest in Florida, where many
will remain convinced that Mr Gore was deprived of a rightful
victory.
"I saw hundreds of votes not counted from Miami-Dade," Ion Sancho, a
Leon County election supervisor in charge of recounting ballots from
Leon and Miami-Dade counties before the count was supended on
Saturday, said. "We examined 4,000 of those undervotes and I'm
convinced we had a massive failure in the punch-card ballot system. I
believe we have not had an accurate count of the vote in the state of
Florida."
Democrat leaders refused to condemn Mr Jackson's words directly,
angering Republicans. "Anyone in a position of leadership in this
country would have to repudiate remarks like that," a spokeswoman for
Dick Armey, the House majority leader, said.
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Ltd.
*****
Congratulations:
It worked
Bush's tarnished prize
By Eric Alterman
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
Dec. 13 — Let's not mince words: George W. Bush, aided by a
narrow conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court willing to
invent new legal theory out of whole cloth specifically for these
purposes, has stolen the 2000 election. Al Gore indisputably won the
popular vote. He almost certainly would have won the tally in the
Electoral College had Florida's vote ever been subjected to a full
and fair manual count as mandated by Florida law.
Bush owes his victory not to voters, but to a network of
conservative hacks who managed to run out the clock on a fair count
of the votes.
HOW DO WE KNOW? Just look at the lengths to which Bush, and
his allies in the Florida Governor's office, the Florida Secretary of
State's office, the Florida legislature, the U.S. House of
Representatives, and now, the U.S. Supreme Court were willing to go
to prevent it. The Bush forces realized they had no chances of
winning a fair count, so they were forced to employ a scorched-earth
policy to prevent one. Congratulations, it worked.
TARNISHED PRIZE
George Bush will become president on Jan. 20 as the most
tarnished individual to take the oath of office in more than a
century. He owes his victory not to the majority of the voters, but
to an informal network of conservative political and legal hacks who
managed to successfully run out the clock on a fair count of the
votes. The degree to which the U.S. Supreme Court was willing to make
itself a party to these tawdry proceedings would be shocking, were it
not for all the shameless precursors that foreshadowed it. That once-
hallowed institution emerges from this election a far bigger loser
than any candidate who may have unsuccessfully ran for office.
STRANGE LEGAL LOGIC
Beneath their flowing robes, the majority justices are all political
professionals chosen by conservative Republican presidents because
they believed they could be trusted to do the `right' thing.
The Orwellian implications of the court's confused decision
are almost too much to keep straight. The anti-activist court decided
a presidential election entirely on its own volition. The
conservative/states' right section of the court overturned Florida
election law as interpreted by that state's Supreme Court. It did so
by embarking on a new legal theory — the notion that different
counting standards violate the equal protection and due process
provisions of the federal Constitution — that calls into question
virtually every single state's counting methods in the future. (And
moreover, if properly applied, it would overturn the entire election,
as different voting methods — i.e. butterfly ballots, punch-cards,
and optical scanners are certainly no less unequal than the methods
used to count them.)
But here is the real beauty part. As it "remanded" the Florida
Court's decision, it did so in a fashion that was calculated to make
any remedy impossible. How did it do that? By relying on exactly the
same decision it had rejected, insisting that the Dec. 12 electoral
deadline is somehow sacrosanct because the Florida Supreme Court had
itself accepted it. And it did so by releasing its decision a bare
two hours before the deadline passed, making any challenge
impossible. Pure coincidence, no doubt.
In fact, the Court's sacred Dec. 12 deadline is a fiction. As
David Greenberg has repeatedly pointed out, in 1960, Hawaii arranged
for its Electoral College votes to be switched when it was determined
that Kennedy, not Nixon, had won a carefully audited count after the
vote had already been certified. The only true deadline for getting a
full count finished is the day of the actual vote, Jan. 6, when the
Electoral College actually meets to choose the president.
LAYERS OF CORRUPTION
Was it relevant to the court's decision that Clarence Thomas' wife
was already working for an outfit that is helping to handle the Bush
transition?
Discovering the many layers of personal and political
corruption that undergird this decision will challenge scholars for
decades. Was it relevant to the court's decision that Clarence
Thomas' wife was already working for an outfit that is helping to
handle the Bush transition? What of the fact that two of Justice
Scalia's children work for law firms hired to represent George W.
Bush? It is wrong to impute motives on the basis of circumstance, and
so I will refrain.
But clearly these facts are relevant: Beneath their flowing
robes, the majority justices are all political professionals chosen
by conservative Republican presidents because they believed, rightly
or wrongly, that they could be trusted to do the "right" thing in any
situation that might arise.
If that means unprecedented judicial activism in the name of
judicial restraint, so be it. If that means a federal overturning of
a state law in the name of states' rights, so be it. If that means
inventing new legal theory in the name of past precedent, so be it.
If that means relying on a case from a court whose decision it has
already rejected, so be it.
In a way, the Supreme Court decision perfectly embodies the
Bush campaign, from the candidate's romancing of racist and anti-
Catholic vote at Bob Jones University to his nearly successful
attempt to hide crucial aspects of his background and history until
the contest's very last moments. Bush calls his political
philosophy "Compassionate Conservatism." A more accurate slogan would
be "Whatever It Takes." We better get used to it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor
to MSNBC on the Internet.
*****
Déjà vu may bode ill for Bush If eerie similarities to Adams
continue, term could be tough
By Jonathan Weisman
USA TODAY
The son of a patrician president, he won the White House without the
benefit of the popular vote, vanquishing a military veteran from
Tennessee with the help of a few old friends in Washington.
Humble in victory but hobbled by partisan acrimony, John Quincy Adams
confessed to the American people in his 1825 inaugural address that
he was ''less possessed of your confidence than any of my
predecessors.''
Less possessed he was. After a largely fruitless term, he was
trounced in a rematch with his Democratic rival, Andrew Jackson, in
1828.
The parallels between Adams and George W. Bush are fascinating stuff
for history buffs, but Bush had better hope his links to Adams end
there. The first presidential son to reach the White House had a
tough time of it once he got there, in large part because the Jackson
forces never let the bitter election rest.
Like Bush, Adams ran as a centrist battling a Tennessean who framed
himself as the protector of the little guy against Washington's
entrenched powers. Tens of thousands of voters, who until then were
denied the right to vote because they did not own land, eyed Adams'
upper-crust background warily, not quite buying his claim to be a
uniter, not a divider.
Adams took Bush's bipartisan pitch even further, calling himself a
Jeffersonian Federalist, a tagline akin to a politician taking the
mantle Democratic Republican today.
But Jackson appeared to have the allegiance of the people. Though a
Southerner, he wowed the political elite with boisterous rallies in
the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York and New
Jersey.
Come Election Day, Jackson easily out-polled Adams in the popular
vote, 153,544 to 108,740. But none of the four presidential
candidates in the bitter election of 1824 secured enough electoral
votes to win outright. Old friends in Washington -- in this case, the
House of Representatives -- banded together to deliver Adams the
White House by a single vote. Adams returned to Pennsylvania Avenue
24 years after the departure of his father, John Adams, who was 90 at
the time.
Jackson was furious, railing against the ''corrupt bargain'' that had
thwarted his presidential ambitions, fuming about the unpaid national
debt, even excoriating Washington power brokers for betraying him in
his battles for Florida. (In that case, those battles were part of
Jackson's Indian wars.)
The thousands of first-time voters who had flocked to the
Tennessean's campaign felt disenfranchised once again.
Adams tried to slow development of the West, create a national
university and expand the country's network of roads with federal
money. But Congress largely ignored his ideas.
Meanwhile, Jackson's friends plotted revenge, laying the groundwork
for a decisive victory in 1828, not only in the popular vote but in
the Electoral College as well.
*****
Media, Other Groups Plan to Do Recounts
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 14, 2000; Page A28
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Dec. 13 –– More than a dozen political, media and
watchdog groups, using Florida's public information laws, intend to
revive the arduous process of manually tallying disputed presidential
ballots now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ended the official
counting of votes.
Election officials in Broward County, where the canvassing board had
recounted 6,000 undervotes--ballots on which no vote for president
registered--have already scheduled a Monday morning review for at
least 14 organizations, including The Washington Post, that have
asked to examine the punch cards.
Among those pressing to review the ballots are newspapers based in
Florida and elsewhere, the NAACP, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH
Coalition and Washington-based Judicial Watch, a conservative
watchdog group.
"The issue is what would the result have been if the recount had
continued in the manner established by the Florida Supreme Court,"
said Martin Baron, executive editor of the Miami Herald. Baron said
his newspaper, either on its own or in collaboration with other
media, plans to examine, describe and tally all of Florida's
undervotes.
Though Florida law considers votes to be public documents open for
review, only election officials are allowed to handle the ballots,
raising questions about how an unofficial count would be conducted
and at what cost.
In Broward County, for instance, election board workers will be paid
$13 an hour to hold the individual ballots in the air so that
reporters and other participants can see them. The organizations will
share the expense.
"I'm not going to have my entire staff there," said David Beirne,
assistant to the supervisor of elections. "But I'll do my best,
depending on the number of organizations that want to be involved."
Further complicating this unofficial recount is disagreement among
groups over whether to review all disputed ballots or solely the
undervotes. In its order last week for a statewide manual recount,
the Florida Supreme Court had directed that only undervotes be
tallied.
But Judicial Watch, which had already begun its own count of votes in
Palm Beach County before those ballots were moved by court order to
Tallahassee, wants to examine all disputed ballots, including
undervotes, overvotes--ballots discarded because more than one
presidential choice was registered--and any others.
"You'll have an independent set of numbers you can compare and
contrast with those of the partisans who come in after us and the
partisans on the canvassing boards," said Tom Fitten, the group's
president.
Jackson, meanwhile, repeated his group's intention to examine all
disputed ballots in Florida counties where he contended thousands of
African Americans had been denied the chance to have their votes
counted.
And Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, said his organization would
want to review both undervotes and overvotes across Florida in
advance of pursuing several lawsuits alleging discrimination and
voting irregularities.
"We'd like to see where the votes weren't counted, why they weren't
counted and was there a racial reason they weren't counted," he said.
In an effort to test a theory about differences between precincts
using punch cards and those using optical scan systems, political
scientist Michael Martinez of the University of Florida said he may
simply ask to review the ballots in two counties.
Under Florida state law, each county sets its own procedure for
allowing public access.
Jamie Wilson, executive director of the Florida Republican Party,
said any further counting of ballots is pointless. "The case has been
run through all the legal channels. It's time for finality." He
declined to say whether his party would try to block further
examination of the ballots.
About 20 groups have asked to scrutinize at least some of the 29,000
disputed votes in Miami-Dade County, which are currently being held
in Tallahassee, but officials said that effort may not begin until
next month.
In Ocala, a coalition of civil rights groups, led by local chapters
of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is
pressing local elections officials to move forward and complete the
recount.
Duval County, where a disproportionate number of the 27,000 discarded
votes were in heavily African American precincts, poses a
particularly daunting problem, because undervoted and overvoted punch
cards have not been separated from the 292,000 ballots cast.
Staff writers Jennifer Lenhart, Carol Morello, Greg Schneider and
Peter Slevin contributed to this report.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
*****
MEDIA CRUCIAL AS BUSH FACES "LEGITIMACY GAP"
By Norman Solomon / Creators Syndicate
Is the next presidency going to be legitimate?
This question now hovers over George W. Bush. Made possible
by a
bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, his triumph is lawful -- but
many
Americans see it as illegitimate. Bush can look forward to wielding
enormous legal power. But his moral authority is another matter.
While eagerly claiming the title of president-elect, Bush
faces a
huge "legitimacy gap." Its magnitude and duration remain to be seen.
But
five weeks before Jan. 20, his Inauguration Day seems likely to ring
hollow
for much of America.
Right now, this crisis of legitimacy is somewhat befuddling
for
large numbers of reporters and commentators. Midway through December,
some
political journalists are indicating a sense of disorientation. And
it's by
no means certain how quickly or fully they'll revert to the usual
media
reverence for an incoming president.
In addition to notable events in Florida and transparently
partisan actions by the federal Supreme Court, a key underlying fact
is
that Bush placed second in the nationwide popular vote. Across the
country,
Al Gore received about 330,000 more votes than Bush did. For the
first time
since 1888, the candidate who received the most votes for president
has lost.
Even if nothing untoward had happened in Florida, the
spectacle of
the runner-up winning the presidency should have -- and probably
would have
-- appreciably tarnished the luster of a Bush victory. But other
anti-democratic dynamics have been extreme. And we're left to assess
the
convergence of realpolitik forces that enabled Bush to win Florida's
25
electoral votes and the White House.
Of all the phrases that came to routinely fall from the lips
and
computers of journalists during the past weeks, none drips with more
infuriating irony than "equal protection" -- a mantra incessantly
repeated
by the Bush legal team and embraced by the nation's High Court.
An unrelenting propaganda barrage promoted very
circumscribed
notions of what "equal protection" means. Soon, we were pushed
through the
media looking-glass.
It was Humpty Dumpty who proclaimed scornfully, "When I use
a
word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor
less." As
far as Mr. Dumpty was concerned, Alice had no cause for
complaint. "The
question is," he said, "which is to be master -- that's all."
Equal protection. Most of the Supreme Court waxed righteous,
declaring that not all votes had been treated alike. The troubled
justices
seemed unconcerned that -- on a much larger scale -- not all voters
had
been treated alike.
Equal protection. But not for people who faced a butterfly
ballot.
Equal protection. But not for thousands of African-American
citizens improperly purged from Florida's voting rolls.
Equal protection. But not for black Floridians who
encountered
hostile questions from police as they neared polling stations.
Equal protection. But not for citizens in low-income
precincts who
had no choice but to use antiquated punch-card voting machines --
prone to
malfunction -- while voters in more affluent areas of the state were
much
more likely to use modern optical-scanner devices.
After the fact, newspapers including The Washington Post and
The
Miami Herald did some fine stories documenting that racial and
economic
inequities prevented many thousands of Gore votes from being tallied.
Several prominent syndicated columnists, such as Bob Herbert and
Arianna
Huffington, explained that in Florida on Nov. 7, racism carried the
Election Day.
Equal protection? Overall, journalists customarily encourage
us to
internalize a narrow version of the concept -- as preferred by those
with
the most power to define it.
A dozen years ago, speaking of George W. Bush's father,
fellow
Texan Jim Hightower commented: "He is a man who was born on third
base and
thinks he hit a triple." Today, George the Second exudes his own
sense of
entitlement. And his wooing of the White House press corps has begun.
Backers will do all they can to instill an aura of
legitimacy for
the new regime. Meanwhile, most journalists are inclined to be
deferential
toward the nation's highest office and the man in it. And we can
expect a
lot of congressional Democrats to polish their patriotic images by
genuflecting toward President George W. Bush on a regular basis. Only
pressure from the grassroots, fueled by tenacious memory and
independent
thought, can deny the incoming Bush administration the national sense
of
legitimacy that it craves.
__________________________________________________
Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His latest book is "The
Habits of
Highly Deceptive Media."
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